> reading some of the reviews for haswell, seems he was a lucky boy getting one that > can reach 4.8ghz on air cooling. > > ..most of them seem to be crapping out at 4.6ghz.
Yeah, [H]ardOCP relayed a caution from ASUS that the engineering samples averaged around 4.5 to 4.6 GHz and were pretty variable part-to-part. (Kyle at HOCP got it to boot Windows as high as 5.0 GHz with a full water cooling setup but it wasn't stable). My guess is that after a month or two of production the variance will flatten out, hopefully in the faster direction. Intel aren't the masters of process technology for nothing.
Plus you wouldn't want to buy one today anyway; all available motherboards have a defective stepping of the chipset which means the USB 3.0 ports will die if the system enters a sleep state (you have to unplug and replug the affected devices).
ETA: we can pretty much answer if Haswell ends the need for an Nvidia or AMD video card to do HLSL in MAME: no. The highest-spec "GT3" onboard graphics for Haswell benches consistently behind the Nvidia GeForce 650M commonly found in laptops, and on shader-heavier loads it gets more behind.
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